Dead Certain

wonder if perhaps there isn’t some sort of history there. After all, McDermott has a reputation as a womanizer, and Farah Davies looks like someone who’s turned a few heads in her time.”
    “I know, that’s why it bugs me that I can’t remember where I’ve met her before.”
    “I’m going to have to ask Claudia if Farah Davies and McDermott were ever an item.”
    “How does Claudia know them?”
    “She’s doing her six-month rotation through Prescott Memorial’s trauma unit. McDermott works trauma there one day a week.”
    “That’s funny. He doesn’t seem like the type to spend his time digging bullets out of junkies.”
    “Shhhh,” I whispered in his ear. “In this group we prefer to refer to them as the deserving poor.”
     
    We eventually made it to our table, which was at the very front of the room at the foot of the dais. Under my mother’s watchful eye I dutifully took Elliott full circle around the table, introducing him to the various Prescotts and Millhollands in attendance. Except for their bank balances, they weren’t exactly an impressive lot. Besides my mother and father, there was my idiotic cousin Hermione and her husband, Lamont, who’d both been members of a cult in college and who to this day maintained an aura of otherworldliness that I suspected of having been pharmacologically induced. Next to them was Hermione’s mother, an acid-tongued harridan whose nickname was, of all things, Bubbles. Her husband, Art, whose claim to be hard of hearing I never believed but nonetheless understood, sat mutely at her side concentrating on his salad. Uncle Edwin and his latest bride, a beauty queen from Tennessee with a gravity-defying cumulus of blond hair and even more improbable breasts, rounded out the party.
    Fortunately we were spared from the necessity of making small talk by the proximity of the band. Elliott gave my hand a reassuring squeeze under the table, and I found myself desperately wishing that the evening would just be over. After waiting for three years to get Elliott into my bed, the thought of waiting three more hours suddenly seemed interminable.
    When the band stopped playing, Kyle Massius, the president of the hospital, climbed the stairs to the podium to introduce my mother. Like everyone else I grew up with, I had a hard time taking Kyle seriously as an adult. No matter what his accomplishments, in my eyes he would forever remain the skinny smart-ass kid who always got us all into trouble. The fact that he now stood up, straight faced, and sang my mother’s praises after stabbing her in the back by voting to sell the hospital did little to improve my assessment.
    When he was through being insincere, my mother rose to her feet and ascended to the podium. Every year since I could remember, my mother had risen to make her customary welcoming speech. As a child it used to astonish me how hard she worked to prepare these few banal sentences of thanks and welcome. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood how few opportunities the women of her generation had to stand in the spotlight and how greatly they were cherished.
    But tonight there was the glint of something dangerous in her eyes as she took her place behind the podium, her great-grandmother’s necklace glittering at her throat. She paused for a moment, looking out over the hundreds of faces, nearly every one belonging to someone she knew personally and who had shelled out a thousand dollars a couple to be there.
    “An event of this magnitude is made possible by the work of many, many people,” she began. “Every year the members of the Prescott Memorial Hospital Auxiliary’s steering committee work for the entire year to plan the event you are enjoying this evening, an event that I might add raises more than a half a million dollars to provide health care for the most needy citizens of Chicago.
    “While many of you may not be aware of this, there is another annual tradition associated with the Founders Ball. Every year on the Monday morning following the gala, next year’s steering committee hosts a luncheon at the Saddle and Cycle Club to thank the committee members who worked so hard to make this night possible.” The partygoers paused in the middle of their salads to offer up their hearty applause. Mother waited until they’d finished before she continued.
    “Thank you,” she said. “It is in this way, with only one day in which to rest and put their feet up, that the tireless members of